The idea that comprehensive schools are producing illiterate and innumerate school leavers plays neatly into the prejudices of journalists and business owners (the majority of whom have been privately educated), whilst simultaneously justifying the poor pay and conditions on offer to shop floor staff.
Anybody who has spent any time around young people in the UK will know that they are, if anything, far more literate than previous generations, which should come as no surprise since they spend a greater amount of time reading and writing on electronic devices.
I don't think this is sufficient as people tend to group with people like themselves. For example, I do not believe I know any adults without a university degree. I might erroneously conclude that virtually everyone goes to university. Most people do not have one.
Statistics...
According to the 2019 AEI report on postsecondary attainment, the UK currently has 51.6% postsecondary attainment amongst those then aged 25-34: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/International...
Reports for the entire working-force (e.g. 25-65) will skew much lower due to the significantly lower percentage of postsecondary education in the overall population that started to rise through to the 1990s.
It's disturbingly routine, in the US at least, to have a degree with barely even a grade school understanding of math. And although total illiteracy is uncommon among high-school and college-educated people, you would be surprised how many can't write a normal paragraph or follow a written argument.
You can't necessarily see this with normal public or workplace interactions, but it is real.
I'm British myself but I've been living in the US west-coast for the past 7.5 years because I get paid 2-3x more here for the exact same work (heck, even 4x if you don't count London).
The reasons for the disparity are as complex as they are legion - but I believe the size of the market you can sell to matters the most - and with the UK out of the EU the size of the effective market it can realistically sell to has shrunk considerably, so I don't see things getting better at all for the UK eng sector.
...secondarily, the UK is having the same problem the US is having with boomer-generation people still working and occupying senior positions... and housing... which limits opportunities for nominal upward mobility in younger professionals, which in-turn suppresses total-comp. This is especially a problem given the UK's entrenched business culture which I'm not personally a fan of.
And it makes sense, if you can't rely on automatic systems to do part of your work, you will be trained by your daily tasks to be a more powerful thinker.
If what the company do is hard, being ok will not cut it. You cannot google your way into innovation, you can't copy/paste architecture design, and your calculator won't save you from a logical mistake.
I'm personnally very adapted to agile envs with margin of errors and a lot of feedback loops. But a waterfall is more challenging, because I'm not born in it. And you don't use scrum to build the path to moon landing.
More than that, I arised in the "a good dev is lazy" period, where working smart, not hard was praised. But hitting 30, reality calls back: there are no shortcut to awesomeness, you will have to work hard. And not many engineers are ready to do so. The ones who do often create their company.
It's not like they are reading anything well written or writing elegantly by themselves. Volume and quality are two different things.
I doubt the average young person even knows that Homer is the author of the Iliad and not a character on The Simpson’s.
https://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/building...
I'd also say that I think schools in the UK (and I would imagine other countries) totally fail at teaching essential skills required for life. Financial literacy, basic cooking skills (I did home economics but it was the same course my mother did at school 30 years prior), how to actually learn things yourself (one of the most valuable skills in my opinion), how to plan and organise yourself for life, how to deal with problems that come up in life (bills, relationships, pets, whatever), how to fix things, drive/maintain a car, how credit ratings work, the value in travel and new experiences, etc.
My comments are based on an experience from 20 years ago but it seems that not much has improved since then. I've no idea how to solve these problems and prepare future generations, but its something I'd love to help figure out. My current assessment is that youtube feels like it provides a more valuable education system than state run schools.
Room for improvement? Yes, hugely. Total failure? I think that's hyperbole.
Kids learn to read nowadays at 5 or 6 (so some of them enter school already being able to read), learning to write and perform basic maths is not that hard either. The fact that you use these measures as a baseline shows that the education system is a train wreck.
While I did learn reading, writing and math, my writing skills were subpar and this was never spotted or addressed. More importantly most of the writing skills taught were essay writing or letter writing. The former isn't particular relevant to the writing I do in day to day life and the latter was archaicly formal. The most valuable writing skills I got from school were actually science report writing (helped a lot with documentation and communication in a work setting) and even then I've learned far more from organisational roles in my hobbies and during my career than I ever did at School (or the formal education part of uni).
One thing that is often missing from these conversations is that arguably the goal of education isn't really to teach you any specific skill, but rather to give you the capability to learn things by yourself.
Part of this process will necessarily mean teaching you things like reading and writing, but whenever I hear "My school didn't teach me X, so I had to teach myself, wasn't my school terrible", I think "no, probably not."
(Paternalism warning:) My main take-away from that experience was that the people that I feel would benefit the most from media-literacy and critical-thinking are the ones who wouldn't have been given an opportunity to study it at secondary-school in the first place...
Not that I disagree, but the opinion is coming from a very specific view point. If the kids had strong educations, would they be okay getting paid £10 an hour / £16k a year.
It's not at all dissimilar to walking into a conference of learned and decorated economists, and being disappointed that only a handful know how to administer First Aid.
I would have thought Mrs White might recognise the limitations of her data, as a scholar would, given her Economics degree from Cambridge and her Masters in the same, gained at UCL.
Presumably, John Lewis has an application & interview process which would have been successfully navigated by the people is talking about.
Methinks her motives are not perhaps not pure.
Is that terrible in the UK? That's like $14 an hour and large swaths of Americans are expected to live on that with much shittier welfare than the UK.
For example, 100 years worth of exam papers could be written all at once, and questions shuffled so the exam paper each year has the same difficulty.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744...
Not sure any kid today would understand the sentence "Decline I." though.
For France, it was eye opening ( and the same for the French side of Switzerland)
We have a huge issue with the degree-laden failures of society ending up as teachers as pay is terrible and the bar to entry is extremely low.
These teachers couldn't function in the real world with their beliefs , and so they take it upon themselves to brainwash their young and captive audiences in lieu of actually educating them.
- an acquaintance who is a teacher takes breakfast (at her own expense on a tight salary) into class for all her 8-9 year old students because she knows that some of them don't get fed at home
- my daughters teacher started and runs an engineering class after school for the kids using donations of machinery and components from parents (I gave them a defunct hedge cutter which they stripped down and then rebuilt to show how the motor works)
- the head of the other primary school in town goes to the traveler camps out in the country side and goes door to door to engage the families and persuade them to send their kids to school. He is physically frail, openly gay and anyone who has gone to those camps knows that this is a genuinely risky thing to do - but he does it, every summer, because he cares about the kids. Btw, the fact that he brings them into his school means that he has an extra cohort of really challenging problems every summer which slamdunks into the toilet his chance of further preferment and performance related pay.
I think you should spend some time in schools, perhaps you could see if one of them near you needs a governor - you might learn something.
So this is very predictable when you actually think about it.
It's just that we've build a whole society around not paying for things, not investing long term, only paying attention to the loudest dumbest voices and no one thinking more than 1 election ahead.
I think the same seems to be happening in a lot of English-speaking countries (USA, Aus etc)
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/14369
This is without accounting for any of the other factors: closure of special needs schools, forcing more kids to stay longer and take all classes, banning expulsions, etc.
We also spent a tonne of money on things like Academies and other political pet projects.
At 16 you can either enter more education or do an apprenticeship that includes training. Classically one might study A levels until 18 and apply for university, or go the vocational route and do an apprenticeship.
Companies in the retail sector like John Lewis, created retail apprenticeships. This involves getting paid £4.30 (for reference minimum wage for an adult over 23 not on an apprenticeship is £8.91) an hour to stand at a till. The company is supposed to in return provide a qualification and allow the staff 20% of their time to study for it. The government pay for the training, although larger companies have to contribute. One might suggest that the people applying for retail apprenticeships are going to be at the lower end of academic attainment.
Now I read this article, and I see John Lewis complaining that they are having to train there people they have contracted to train and are working for a pittance to get.
Relevant quote : “To have done ten years, 11, 12 years of education, and not having, in many cases, functional literacy, certainly, pretty typically not having functional numeracy beyond the age of, I’d say, ten, 11, means that they may then have fabulous people skills and fabulous skills in terms of operating in a team but that’s almost out with the education system,” White said.
Glass houses.
